Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Well, have you considered the positional issues I raised in the
earlier post? The order in which people vote is quite important.
Offhand, here is an idea:
You know, I meant to address that and I completely forgot :) I think
you do raise a valid issue. I'm not really sure how to solve it...
simple anonymous vote seems the best answer, but how do you pull that
off? If you have a webapp specially for people to vote, someone could
always accuse you of "cooking" the code :)
I guess you and I think quite differently about certain things. In
another part of this discussion, you mentioned malice as a reason not to
give people commit access on an "on-demand" basis. However, this is
something that hardly occurs to me as being much of a reason. In the
above, you mention the idea that your secret voting mechanism could be
"cooked" or people could suspect it is. This also never really occurred
to me. I guess I just have a certain basic trust in the ethics of other
open source people, and it does not occur to me that someone would cook
the voting or that anybody would think that I would cook the voting.
But look, if somebody distrusts your ethics to that extent, why would
they be in your community?
> That is I think one of the
> reasons most projects go with a public vote on a list, and I tend to
agree.
Well, you know, it could also be that a public vote is preferred because
project leaders are (at least vaguely) aware that if the vote is public
people are less likely to disagree with them. (Of course, that is not
exactly a legitimate reason.)
Maybe you should have a vote that is non-binding among the simple
users. Effectively if most users are against something, then the idea
is not immediately rejected, but it is indicative of a need for more
debate. If most users are in favor, then you could move on to the
committers voting and so on.
The problem is that once the people higher on your pecking order, your
PMC, vote +1, this will bias the votes of the lower status people.
(Also, the PMC are the people who are -- hopefully -- more involved
and are likely to put in their votes with less delay.) The results of
the voting is bound to be highly dependent on the order in which
voting takes place, don't you think?
Yes, I do agree it is a concern. I'm not sure I would say it is
*highly* dependent on order, but I *do* think it comes into play.
Well, if it comes into play at all, it should be considered.
Well, I just proposed a few changes to the bylaws on the JWP mailing
list, and I wish I hadn't forgotten about this point because I would
have tried to address it too. I have to think about it a bit and try
and find a decent solution, I'm not sure what it might be at the moment.
Your intent is good, but I am skeptical that all this formalized
voting is really the way open source projects should work. I'm not
saying I have all the alternatives figured either.
You know, it's funny, but a few years ago I was quite the anti-open
source guy :) I've definitely changed my thinking on some things over
the years.
Well, maybe (just maybe, I'm not really *so* presumptuous) the next step
of evolution of your thinking is to move more towards implicitly
trusting people. I mean: trust people to be acting in good faith until
proven otherwise. Trust people to be at least moderately competent until
proven otherwise.
In general, in this kind of collaborative internet model, don't you have
to make a leap of faith and implicitly trust (until proven otherwise, of
course) people you've never met?
You see, what is the alternative? If you don't trust people by default,
then how is trust established?
I mean, this seems to be related to the catch 22 problem that you become
a committer by contributing a lot, but it's practically impossible to
contribute without being a committer in the first place, Craig never
responded to this basic question. (Somehow, I suspect he won't.)
AFAICS, what this kind of thing has led to is complete stagnation, where
Struts has become so uncompetitive that everybody just had to accept
that Webwork was better. What I also see, just as a lurker here, is that
there is a complete lack of willingness to really deal with the
implications of this. I mean, when you've had to accept that Struts
stagnated and Webwork progressed, how can you not be somewhat humble
when discussing these kinds of project management issues?
Actually, you know, in the earlier message, where I used the terms
"immature" and "unwise" in my response to Craig, an earlier draft
contained much harsher adjectives. Of course, when somebody says stuff
like: "Deal with it or go away" that person is hardly expressing a
willingness to have an open-minded exchange of ideas about something.
Frankly, I don't think that kind of tone or attitude should be
considered acceptable.
But the real problem here, that just about everybody seems to be
skirting around is that, given the utter failure of the Struts community
to compete with Webwork technically, there surely is a need for an
open-minded exchange of ideas about these project management issues. And
the people who lost the technical competition (the Struts people)
should, by the basic logic and structure of competitition, adopt a
fairly humble attitude about these topics.
Well, it's like the alcoholic who has to admit that he has a problem,
this community would have to admit that it has certain problems for any
improvements to occur. But of course, since they won't admit it, no
improvements will occur and.... well,... look, it's obviously a lost
cause.... (I quickly came to that conclusion after reading some of
Craig's (and Ted's) recent comments.)
I actually am not somebody with strong opinions at the moment about web
app development. I don't know so much about Spring and other frameworks
and so on. However, just from what I observe lurking in this community,
I would have one recommendation for anybody who asked my opinion on
these matters. And that is: Whatever else you decide on, do not use
Struts (I mean, don't use Struts Classic, don't use Struts Action, don't
use Struts Shale) because the community is dysfunctional... major league
FUBAR...
One of the things I *haven't* changed my mind about though
is the need for more formality. I don't believe that *some* rigidity
and *some* project management methodologies is incompatible with the
idea of community development. Obviously you can't take it too far, but
I'm trying to figure out where the line is :)
I really don't know either. I say that this kind of thing is something
not to be approached dogmatically. It's like the question of how much
strictness and discipline to use in child-rearing. You need some but you
can also overdo it.
I think a lot of what has to happen revolves around common sense, and
common sense, like intuition and so on, is going to be quite hard to
formalize into a set of rules. Personally, I don't take the idea of
formalized voting that seriously. I think an open-source project is
surely more like a dictatorship. But the dictator needs to listen to
people. It just occurred to me that one basic difference between a
dictatorship and this is that in a dictatorship like Sadam's Iraq or
someplace, the Iraqis just had to keep living there. In an open-source
project, everybody can just leave and you're left dictating to nobody
but yourself.
If nothing else, I prefer being up-front with people, and I don't want
there to be any mystery in the process. The voting system may be
somewhat unwieldly, and I in no way think it's perfect, but I would
prefer that to having to figure out how to do a vote every time one
comes up :)
I say that no formalized voting system will substitute a basic need to
be able to listen to people in an open-minded way (that means,
considering seriously the possibility that you are wrong) and being
flexible and so on.
This actually reminds me of the various attempts to set up democracy in
backward, third world places. These countries do not have the basic
institutions or culture of democracy. Having the formal vote does not
make them into democracies.
I mean, what I just see is that you have somebody with what is basically
a dictatorial mind-set (it's this way, we're the self-selected
meritocracy and if you don't like our decisions, go away) but
sanctimoniously pointing me to pages that explain all these voting
procedures, like there is a democracy or some variant on that. Really it
reminds me of third-world dictators saying: "Yeah, we have elections all
the time, check it out, the governing party won 98% of the vote and...."
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
FreeMarker group blog, http://freemarker.blogspot.com/
Jonathan Revusky
Frank
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